How to stop your home from becoming a giant play area

All of us with children have at one point or another almost lost our lives to either to a toy fire truck or other toy by stepping on it or sliding across the floor on it. I for one am good at stepping on the Legos that has nowhere to go but up. Another one is bumping my feet into the most noisiest toys in the middle of the night ...you know the ones that light up and are extremely loud and doesn't shut off for another ten minutes. I have a plan that will stop this from happening.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Lots of patience and understanding

1. 
    

   First before anything, remember back to when you played as a child. How important was it to you to make sure that your bedroom was nice and neat before you went to bed every night? Or how important was it to you that your toys weren't scattered around the house during the day. Right! All I cared about was that my Barbie's hair looked good and no one had better touch her.

2. 
    

   Instead of having about 15+ toys scattered in every single room of the house, I began a ONE TOY RULE. Meaning: He/she cannot bring more than one toy from his/her bedroom to another room of the house. If it's a puzzle or puzzles, that's considered one toy. But if he/she tries to bring cars out with it, this is when the puzzles should be put back. He or she will need to make their choice.

3. 
    

   You will see this practiced automatically in your child's bedroom as well, even if the rule isn't pushed in the bedroom.

4. 
    

   If I see that he has forgotten and there are puzzles, cars, and crayons scattered in the living room, I will ask him what I am seeing and remind him of the One toy rule. He immediately remembers and begins to decide which ones needs to go back. This all lessens the chances of finding Legos in the refrigerator as well.

5. 
    

   Before you know it, you will have a much safer floor to walk on and less toys will be getting lost and broken. Everyone will be happier in the long-run.

[joyful327]

on 4/10/2008 Helpful, thanks! :)

[Blackbear]

on 3/26/2008 Those Legos are painful! I think we could somehow utilize these things to keep prowlers away from our homes if we had a way to de-shoe them with a tacky glue and force them to have to walk on a hard surface covered with Legos. This would work!

[CrazyAce]

on 3/21/2008 Be the parent, set the rules, enforce the rules. It's not rocket science.

[JMOrganizations]

on 3/20/2008 Thanks for the tips. I like the one toy rule.

[CCrock]

on 3/20/2008 This is a great article, I couldn't help but chuckle! My 11 month old is excited about being able to crawl around and pull out anything she can find and scatter it around, be it a basket of toys or the basket of laundry I just finished folding! If only I could explain the one toy rule to her! lol! This will surely come in handy as she gets older though!